Feb. 17th, 2019

When I was in school, everybody knew that stretching was a good idea. That is, either we had personally ripped something or gotten awful cramps because we didn't bother to stretch out before doing something vigorous, or we'd seen other people make that mistake and decided to be more careful ourselves. The connection was really sort of obvious.

Currently, I use stretching in small bits scattered throughout the day, because if I don't, my butt welds itself to the chair and my muscles lock up. Stretch, or ache. This also is really fucking obvious. Some people's bodies don't knot up as much as others, but if you sit long enough -- and people nowadays tend to sit a LOT -- then eventually it will happen. It can be fixed by stretching.

Anyone who's done a bendy sport -- cheerleading, gymnastics, bellydancing, yoga, etc. -- can tell the difference between people who do some kind of stretching regularly and people who do not. Granted, there is a strong genetic factor in how stretchy your body is, but it will certainly bend better if you stretch it regularly than if you do not. And if you haven't done it recently, you can sure feel the difference when you try to do it.

Yes, some refugees today are in exactly the position of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. They leave or they die, because some countries are killing Muslims or Christians or whatever else they've decided to hate; others are killing gays and transfolk and women who wear pants; quite a few are targeting doctors, scientists, journalists, and other intellectuals; and several just seem to be shooting anything that moves. It's the same. It's people fleeing genocide because they don't want to die.

And countries are responding now just as they did to Jews: turning them away. Oh sure, after WWII everyone was "shocked" and "sorry" that Jews sent back to Germany were executed en masse. After most of the Jews were safely dead and not in need of food, shelter, or any other assistance anymore. People will turn back desperate masses and then be "shocked" and "saddened" when a toddler winds up drowned on their beach. Well, when people are in dire situations, they will escape as best they can, and if nobody helps them do that safely then quite a lot of them will die along the way. So everyone who supports refugee-hostile polices becomes guilty of refoulement and shares part of the moral burden for those deaths, because their choices lead to actions that lead to dead refugees. Those who fight for human rights are not at fault for the errors of others.

This was me. I did this damn near every time someone tried to line us up by gender. If I wasn't doing that, I was standing with the boys. It drove many teachers so batshit that they quit doing gender lines rather than argue with me.